Hey Joe

Can someone please enlighten me: Why the pity party for Joe Lieberman?

The Connecticut senator has been parading around for the last few days, since Al Gore's endorsement of Howard Dean, with the mien of a virtuous spurned lover, trying to position himself much as Princess Di did after her positively beastly treatment by Prince Charles. Diana pulled it off successfully because she did, in fact, deserve some pity. Lieberman does not.

This is not high tea. This is politics. It's a tough game, and, as they say in sports, you have to make your own breaks and earn it on the field. So the question: What has Lieberman done to earn Gore's endorsement?

The answer is, "not much." He hasn't performed. I know at this point exactly what Lieberman partisans would say: that if one looks at the national polls, he's running pretty well (usually third behind Dean and Wesley Clark, sometimes second, occasionally fourth), and he's very much in this thing.

But everyone knows those poll standings are all about name recognition (and, of course, he has such wide name recognition because of . . . Al Gore, who made him an international celebrity by putting him on his 2000 ticket). To anyone watching the race closely, it does not feel as if Lieberman's got anything going for him besides name recognition -- no real oomph behind those numbers, no particular momentum. And if one looks at statewide polls in the important early primary and caucus states -- that is to say, states where voters having been laying eyes on the candidates -- Lieberman isn't much of a factor. His best early state is South Carolina, where he typically runs third or fourth. Not much to brag about.

The full story is even worse. If one looks at the entire arc of this race, Lieberman has actually gone down in the polls. Gore announced that he would not seek the 2004 nomination back on Dec. 15, 2002. That event sparked a new wave of polling. When Hillary Clinton was included, she led. But when she was excluded (because she again issued a round of denials concerning 2004), guess who led? An ABC/Washington Post poll from January 2003 had Lieberman at 27 percent, Dick Gephardt at 14 percent and others trailing. According to the Los Angeles Times, 10 days later those numbers read Lieberman 25, Kerry 20. So Lieberman led in the campaign's early days but has gone in reverse ever since. At the same time, who stood at 3 percent in that ABC/Washington Post poll and at 1 percent in the Times version? Dean.

Lieberman came into this race with every advantage, or at least two gigantic ones: universal name recognition (I would place its market value, in terms of what candidates usually have to spend to achieve the same degree of name recognition, at $10 million or more) and the sympathy of Democrats everywhere for having been part of the team that was robbed in 2000. If he had run an imaginative and engaging and compelling race, he could have established something close to a lock on the nomination by now, or at least a formidable lead.

But he didn't. Now, one can say that Lieberman has suffered because his hawkish war position is at odds with Democratic primary voters -- that is, that he has suffered because of his principles. But who's to say that his war position is any more principled than Dean's -- or, for that matter, anyone else's in the race? Anyone who thinks that the candidates who were seated members of Congress when the war resolution came up cast their votes with no hint of political calculation is obviously a fool. And there's nothing wrong with that; in politics, political calculation is a legitimate factor. Gephardt took Lieberman's war position, too. But Gephardt is doing better right now, and still has a shot at being the nominee, because he has defended that position more persuasively and has other proposals that have resonated with portions of the electorate in a deeper way than anything Lieberman has managed.

Then, on top of that, Lieberman has been the race's most negative candidate. Others have attacked Dean, and fought amongst themselves, in a variety of ways. But almost all of these feuds have been substantive and confined to particular differences. Only Lieberman has said -- or strongly, unmistakably implied -- that another candidate (he meant Dean) was unelectable. No candidate should say that about another candidate in his party. Lieberman was in essence saying that if Dean is the nominee, he might not be able to endorse Dean. I waited for days after Lieberman made that statement on Aug. 4 for Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe to crack the whip publicly. I'm still waiting.

And then, on top of that, it must be noted that Lieberman hasn't limited his criticisms to Dean. Last September, Lieberman lit into Gore himself at a Democratic Leadership Council meeting, saying that Gore lost in 2000 because he used phrases like "the people not the powerful." If loyalty is the subject here, what sort of loyalty is that? For that, Gore owes Lieberman an endorsement? Or even a phone call?

Gore already did Lieberman his favor. By announcing his withdrawal from the race as early as he did, he said to Lieberman, "It's all yours, Joe." If he'd wanted to gum Lieberman up, Gore could have waited until March 2003, or even June 2003, to decide, by which time all the money people and consultants would have been hitched to other posts. But Gore rather graciously gave Lieberman plenty of time to build on his instant lead in the polls and make the best of it. Instead he's made very little of it. Cry me a river.